Facebook Launches Kaggle Competition for Recruiting

Want to stand out from the crowd and score that coveted interview with the Facebook data science team? Kaggle is excited to announce the Facebook Recruiting Competition, the debut challenge of our newest offering, Kaggle Recruit.

Facebook is well known for their technology-oriented culture and innovative approach to recruiting the best, from hackdays to embedded easter eggs that can only be found by ace programmers. Now, they are partnering with Kaggle to do the same for their recruitment of data scientists. If you want to show them your skills, and not just your resume, this is the competition for you.

Facebook is looking for Data Scientists who have:

[A] keen interest in the study of an online social network … Comfort manipulating and analyzing complex, high-volume, high-dimensionality data … [and] a strong passion for empirical research and for answering hard questions with data.

But these skills can be hard to evaluate through a resume or phone screen. To stand out, applicants need an opportunity to truly demonstrate their creativity, open-mindedness and tenacity, as well as their data science skillset, on real-world social network data. Screening applications through a data science competition decreases both the false positive and false negative rates - fewer bad interviews for them, and no more having great candidates waiting forever for the phone to ring because they come from a non-traditional background.

As this is a new type of Kaggle competition, there are a few tweaks to the rules that you should be aware of. First, there are no teams, everyone must compete as an individual. Second, there is no cash prize. Facebook will review the methods and code from the top finishers and offer interviews to the best ones. Finally, we understand that searching for a new job can be a sensitive process, so participants will have the option to compete anonymously. If you choose this option, you will be assigned a randomized name, so you will still see where you stand on the leaderboard.